‘Do you remember,’ she asked, in a low and tender voice, ’how poor Snip used to follow me down to this very spot, and sit here till I was out of sight?  I was very fond of poor old Snip, Stephen!’ Yes, her voice trembled, and tears were in her eyes.  The proud bulwark which Stephen had been raising against his grief was broken down in a moment.  He sank down on the turf at Miss Anne’s feet; and, no longer checking the tears which had been burning in his eyes all day, he wept and sobbed vehemently, until his passion had worn away.

‘And now,’ said Miss Anne, sitting down beside him, ’I must tell you that, though I am not surprised, I am very, very grieved, Stephen.  If you knew your Bible more, you would have read this verse in it, “God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”  Did no way of escape open to you, Stephen?’

Then Stephen remembered how he had heard dear little Nan calling piteously to him as he passed Fern’s Hollow with Black Thompson; and how his heart yearned to go to her, though he had resisted and conquered this saving impulse.

‘You do not know much,’ continued Miss Anne, ’but if you had followed out all you do know, instead of poaching with Black Thompson that you might revenge yourself for Snip being killed, you would have been praying for them that persecute you.  The Bible says that not a sparrow falls to the ground without our Father.  So God knew that poor Snip was shot.’

‘But why did He not hinder it?’ asked Stephen, speaking low and indistinctly.

‘Stephen,’ said Miss Anne earnestly, ’suppose that I lived in a very grand palace, where there were many things that you had never seen, and I wanted little Nan to come and live with me, not as a servant, but as my dear child; would it be unkind of me to send her first to a school, where she could learn how to read the books, and understand the pictures, and play the music she would find in my palace?  Even if the lessons were often hard, and some of her schoolfellows were cruel and unkind to her, would it not be better for her to bear it for a little while, until she was made ready to live with me as my own child?’

The young lady paused for a few minutes, while Stephen pictured to himself the grand palace, and little Nan being made fit to live in it; and when at last he raised his brown eyes to hers, bright with the pleasant thought, she went on in a quiet, reverential tone: 

’Perhaps we could not understand any of the things of heaven, so our Father which is in heaven sends us to school here; we are learning lessons all our life long.  There is not a single trouble that comes to us but it is to teach us the meaning of something we shall meet with there.  We should not be happy to hear the angels singing a song which we could not understand, because we had missed our lessons down here.’